Lawyers, Guns, and Money

Lawyers, Guns, and Money

By David
Swanson

Why would anyone phone the United
States and ask for lawyers, guns, and money? Primarily
because, other than bad movies, that's most of what the
United States produces. What else could you phone home for
if you wanted to? We produce weapons and movies about
weapons and weapons that were in movies about weapons, and
so on.

And we produce lawyers who push money around desks
and into drawers and out of envelopes. They manipulate money
all day and night, and they call that work, and we
compensate them royally for it. But the money is
increasingly play money because we're not producing anything
else, except the lawyers and the guns.

We measure the play
money with the stock market and report on its fate every day
with the same solemnity used to report the weather, the
sports scores, and the celebrity sex news, but with an even
greater pretense that it somehow affects us. And, instead of
refocusing on producing useful things through real work,
when the whole phony system starts to teeter, we rush to the
toy store, buy up all the board games, rip all the money out
of the packages and give it to the lawyers.

Six years ago,
Kevin Phillips wrote in "Wealth and Democracy":

"The
wealthiest peoples of the last five hundred years have been
among the most speculative -- Americans, British, Dutch. We
have seen how a late stage of luxuriating in finance was
clearly an important element in the Dutch and then British
decline. … If Spain could be bled dry on the battlefields
of Germany and Italy, the Dutch critically shorn of their
trade routes, and British financial hegemony strangled by
war debt, the extent to which the United States has let its
economy become financialized stands to be a
twenty-first-century Achilles' heel."

Today, Richard Cook
wrote:

"[T]he problem stems from the fact that in 1913
Congress privatized our money supply by turning it over to
the private banks that own the Federal Reserve System. This
is also why we have lived under the mass delusion that a
healthy financial sector leads to a healthy producing
economy. Actually it's the other way around. The financial
sector should support the producing economy, not bleed it
dry through interest, fees, commissions, and the destruction
that arises from financial profit-seeking. There is also the
fact that while the producing economy has been hammered by
job outsourcing and bled white by financial parasitism, it
is still a powerful machine that can produce the goods and
services people need. We are a strong, capable nation. And
we are blessed with the resources we require for a decent
standard of living, though not necessarily at a rate of
consumption that forever outpaces the rest of the world. But
what is wrong with that? The underlying strength of the
producing economy was on display this morning, when the
Dow-Jones defied the doomsayers by coming back strongly the
day after the bailout was defeated."

I pair up these two
quotes in an attempt to suggest that imperial greed and
paper-pushing-as-work go together like guns and lawyers. We
can maintain neither, and past empires have seen their home
populations better served by ending both.

Here's a plan to
invest in the real economy and improve global relations,
without borrowing another dime. Our military acknowledges
about 780 bases maintained in other people's countries,
breeding hatred and resentment at huge financial cost.
That's about one base per billion dollars in proposed
bailout for weapon-selling, money-scamming lawyers. And
don't think any of these bases don't drain billions of
dollars from our shriveling real economy.

Here's the
plan. Shut the bases down. Take all the money saved, wave it
in front of the bankers' noses, and then tell them we're
going to use it to pay off our national debt and create real
sustainable jobs. Offer them a choice: they can face
prosecution or they can fill out a job application and begin
working for a
living.

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